Abstract
THE author of this small volume sets out to tell the man in the street all about the stratosphere in simple language a worthy enough object. If the stratosphere becomes the most favoured region for long-distance aeroplane flights, it will, of course, have great practical importance to the general public. No one will deny that the stratosphere is of the utmost importance to meteorology, and that the electrical conditions prevailing at high altitudes are of the utmost importance to radio engineers, that the discovery that cosmic ray intensity increases with increasing height has great significance, and that generally speaking, the upper layers of the earth's atmosphere have great geophysical and astrophysical interest; nevertheless, Mr. Heard seems to us to show a lack of perspective in his first chapter, a general introduction which is packed with references to Magellan and Copernicus on one hand, and the stratosphere explorers (stratonauts) and theoretical investigators of the expanding universe on the other. (“A vast, embracing idea of the whole universe, the whole of reality, is to-day forming in the human mind. It is being hastened forward by stratosphere exploration.”) Mr. Heard is one of the ‘Bright New Things', a citizen of the ‘Brave New World'; surely he is maligning our grandfathers in an uncalled-for manner when he suggests that they would almost have called “this unbelievable surprise” (the constancy of temperature with increasing height exhibited by the stratosphere) “a breach of a Law of Nature ?”
Exploring the Stratosphere
By Gerald Heard. Pp. vii + 98 + 9 plates. London and Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd., 1936.) 3s. 6d. net.
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W., R. Exploring the Stratosphere. Nature 137, 1053 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/1371053a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1371053a0